QoS and QoE Aspects of Digital Financial Services

Digital Financial Services (DFS) offer access to basic financial services to people without or limited access to pyhsical banking, by leveraging mobile phones or point-of-sale devices over mobile communication networks, especially - but not limited to - the developing countries.

However, to make DFS accessible, reliable and safe, a lot of aspects have to be taken into account, from the fitness of a society and its institutions to the individual user, and from the fitness of the mobile network down to the mobile devices of the users. In order to measure and assess the fitness of these components, standardized methods and KPI are required.

As active contributor in ITU-T’s Focus Group DFS, Focus Infocom’s General Manager Dr. Wolfgang Balzer took part in the standardization process for a successful introduction of DFS via mobile networks.

These include Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) aspects of Digital Financial Services (DFS), and in particular analysing the applicability of existing and defining new relevant KPI to measure the fitness of different aspects for DFS, for example:

Fitness of the mobile network, to provide a minimum level of availability and accessibility

Fitness of the mobile network to provide the services required for realization of DFS

Fitness of mobile devices used, to support the basic services used to realize DFS

Fitness of the DFS service itself to provide useable interfaces

Fitness of users to successfully use DFS. This may include the necessary skills to operate DFS on phones as well as basic understanding of properties of DFS in general, to protect users against exploitation of insufficient knowledge

Fitness of the general society and the governmental institutions for DFS

The work of the Focus Group now continues in several Working Groups. There, Dr. Balzer has a role as member of the core team in the Working Group "Security, Infrastructure and Trust", and as one of the co-chairs for the workstream “Quality of Service”.